LEARNING AND TEACHING 151
and breaks up into instinctive channels. The goal towards
which this striving aims may be dim and vague or even
unconscious, as in the lower forms of life, and to some extent
in the higher forms also. And in the case of man himself, the
aims of which he is conscious may be immediate or remote.
But always they are there.
A typical Consider the case of a young man, perhaps a
instance typical reader of this book, who means to become
a professional teacher. If he be a normal young
man, one of his controlling purposes is to marry, to settle
down, to have an establishment of his own, and to found a
family, as his father did before him. He may be clearly or only
vaguely conscious of this purpose, or he may sway between the
one and the other. In any case it is at his age a rather remote
purpose. He knows that he cannot achieve that purpose with-
out success in his profession, which is a less remote purpose.
He knows again that he is unlikely to succeed in his profession
without first succeeding as a student, which is a still less remote
purpose. And he may be convinced that he is not likely so to
succeed, unless he settles down to work this very evening, and
resists the temptation to visit a place of amusement—a choice
which involves an immediate act of striving. Finally, he is not
likely to achieve his great object, unless he lives cleanly and
temperately, and so one of his immediate purposes is to play
a good game and to "keep fit." Thus his whole life, if healthily
and truly lived, may be regarded as a hierarchy of purposes.
In Victorian times, books used to be written for the benefit of
young men, bearing such titles as Living in Earnest, and Living
to Purpose,1 and the young man was enjoined to "be not like
1 The writer calls to mind a passage in one of these books: "The
longer I live, the more firmly am I convinced, that the great difference
between men, between the powerful and the feeble, the great and the
insignificant, is energy, invincible determination—a purpose once fixed,
and then death or victory! That power will do anything that can be
done in this world, and no talents, no opportunities, can make a two-
legged creature a Man without it" (Sir T. F. Buxton,)